Dropping the Needle on Wally Butterworth

Now that Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has caused bipartisan outfreakage by tweeting a truism about the Congress-Israel-Payola Complex, I figured it might be educational to break out my Wally Butterworth records.

Herbert Wallace “Wally” Butterworth was the only known link between grand opera and the Ku Klux Klan.

Known as “the voice with the smile,” he was heard nationwide on network radio during the 1930s and 1940s. For NBC, he was the voice of the Chicago Civic Opera, and served as anchorman for the network’s broadcast of the 1932 Democratic and Republican Conventions. He co-hosted the popular Vox Pop radio show, and was also a pioneer in the quiz show genre, as both a host and producer.

Photo credit: Alchetron Free Social Encyclopedia.

But Wally had one big problem with show business: He hated Jews.

“Wally Butterworth refused to work on the regular Jew owned daily T.V. programs,” explained the National States Rights Party in their journal Thunderbolt. “He is of strong native American stock, and would never bow to Jew control.”

Of course, that was back in the days when antisemitism actually meant antisemitism.

Alarmed by the Civil Rights Movement, Wally headed South in the early 1960s and hooked up with the eminent Georgia Klansman James R. Venable, whose family owned Stone Mountain near Atlanta, where the so-called “second era” Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915.

Photo credit: House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1966.

With Wally identified as “General Manager” on corporate records, Venable launched the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., “a collection of splintered Klan groups from several southern states,” which “quickly grew into one of the largest Klan groups in the nation,” according to researchers at the SPLC’s Poverty Palace.

But Wally knew there was more to life than burning giant crucifixes and having secret meetings with white-hooded rednecks who wouldn’t know Verdi from Wagner. He wanted to use his professional broadcasting skills to make propaganda that would unleash the hate-flood.

So, in 1962, with Imperial Wizard Venable’s money, he started a political action group called the Defensive Legion of Registered Americans. Sporting the all-too-familiar slogan “We’re taking back our country,” the group encouraged White Christians to “band together as one solid voting unit, to legally overcome the evil combination of Negroes and Jews.”

The propaganda arm of the Defensive Legion was a record label called the Christian Voters and Buyers League.

The records – all of them written and narrated by Wally and merchandised in sleeves emblazoned with the words “The Council on Foreign Relations Must Be Destroyed!” — were released every two weeks and priced at $3 each. For an additional 35 cents, you would receive a Shopper’s List that told you which products and retailers to boycott. The lists would fit any standard 3-ring loose-leaf notebook, but for an additional $1 you would get a special notebook imprinted with the Christian Voters and Buyers League name. You could also become a member of the League for $5 per year.

Since the election of Hair Furor, there has been renewed interest in Wally’s recordings among the Stormfront crowd, and one dedicated racist has even gone to the trouble of digitizing many of them and posting them on the Internet Archive.

The development of the record label was summarized in an issue of Thunderbolt:

“After several years of study, research and experimentation, Wally Butterworth found the invention of Thomas Edison to be the best possible way to beat Jew ownership of all means of communication. Thomas Edison’s phonograph is the same thing as a broadcasting station right in your own home … Now is the time to really carry our grass roots message right into the home of millions of Americans … Wally Butterworth does it in a magnificient [sic] and professional way — no one will leave your home without being touched with the desire to go forth and do something about the horrible conditions being foistered [sic] upon the American people by a small, highly organized sect of anti-Christian, Communistic, race-mixing, anti-American Jews!”

A small sampling of titles says it all:

Traitors Disarm USA For One World Government Civil Rights: America’s Funeral Service Guns to Arm Your Home Against Communist-Led Negro Riots

And Jews were blamed for all of it. One record is devoted to slamming the John Birch Society for failing to point out that “Communism was schemed up and unleashed upon a Christian world by Jews and Jews alone.” (John Birch Society: Cunning Deception For Conservatives.)

The first release was Kosher Food Blackmail of American Housewives (with How to Deliver the Knock-Out Punch to Federal Judges on the B-side). As the coupon above indicates, you could order it from the National States Rights Party, but I found mine at a Goodwill store in Texas.

Every Christian Voters and Buyers League record begins with a boilerplate greeting from Wally, followed by a tirade of unbridled racism which one of my young millennial friends once described as “the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

When you drop the needle on Kosher Food Blackmail, this is what you hear:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Wally Butterworth bringing you another program of the Christian Voters and Buyers League. The subject of today’s broadcast: kosher foods and the daily tax you pay to Jews as penalty for being Christian — or rather the daily tax tribute you pay to your masters in this world, the rabbis of Israel. We want to tell you about the dirtiest blackmail ever imposed on the Christian race by those eternal tormentors of humanity known as Jews…. The Christian Voters and Buyers League now exposes this whole theft and extortion. We’re going to show these Jews that the White Christian is the master in America, and not they. Our Christian buyers protest and refusal to buy these Jewish products will drive these leeches out of business in every phase of our economy…. The Christian Voters and Buyers League is going to save this nation, and restore every office of political power to the White Christian man and woman who founded this country, and who is going to take it back again from Nigras and Jews and renegade traitors.”

Now what was that that Representative Ilhan Omar tweeted?

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